by Tad Williams
The first time she sent Agnes out, Briony went to the door with the girl so that the guards could see her in her night-robe. Modesty be cursed, she thought. A warrior has no modesty.
“Hurry back,” she told Agnes loudly enough for all to hear. The soldiers turned to watch the girl hurry by, but Agnes was not the kind to draw much attention from men. She was carrying a note to the king full of the sort of pleading and vows of innocence that could be expected from someone in Briony’s position, but the guards did not even bother to ask her errand, let alone read the letter.
Idiots, Briony thought. Well, I suppose I should be glad they think so little of me here.
While Agnes was gone, Briony went through the chest that contained the few things she had brought to the court at Tessis. She made a bundle of what she wanted and wrapped it in a traveling cloak, the poorest one she could find, a simple, heavy, unembroidered length of dark wool left behind by some visitor and never claimed.
Perhaps it’s one of the prince’s, she thought. Yes, I can imagine Eneas in just such a modest garment, leading his soldiers. It was certainly long enough to belong to him.
Agnes soon returned and Briony sent her on another errand, this one taking a letter to Ivgenia e’Doursos. Briony wanted to let her friend know what happened, and had written to tell her she had been unjustly accused, but of course wrote nothing about what she was planning to do. She had learned she could not trust anyone, not even Ivvie—in fact, she was being forced to rely on young Agnes far more than she liked, but some things could not be helped.
Briony stood in the doorway again and made sure the guards saw her. “Push it under her door,” she told Agnes. “Don’t wake her.”
Agnes smiled. “I’ll be careful.”
The other ladies looked irritated that they were not being sent on these apparently important errands. Briony put them to work getting her some food.
“Bread and cheese from the common store,” she told them. “Lots of it. Let no one know it’s for me. And some dried fruit. Medlars, too—wrap them in a kerchief or they shall get on everything. And what else? Yes, I’d like some quince paste.”
“Are you very hungry, then, Princess?” one of the girls asked.
“Oh, famished. After all, it is hard work being betrayed.”
The ladies went off with wide eyes, whispering behind their hands before they were three steps out the door. Briony noticed that one of the guards had gone somewhere. The other soldier barely looked up as the two young women hurried past.
When the bread and cheese and the rest had been brought back, Briony took it to the retiring room where no one could see, unrolled her bundle, and hid the food in the center of it. “You may go to bed now,” she called to the women. “I am going to wait for Agnes. I am not yet sleepy.”
Disappointed in their hope to see more eccentricity—or perhaps to see Briony eat the entire mound of supplies they had brought back—the ladies-in-waiting went to the retiring room to prepare for bed. A short time later Agnes came back.
“Thank all the gods,” Briony said. “I was beginning to fear something had happened to you.”
“There were people in the hall and I did not know whether you wanted me to be seen or not,” Agnes told her, “so I waited until they were gone. Have I done wrong?”
“Merciful Zoria, you have done nothing of the kind! Why didn’t I discover you before?” She gave the girl a quick kiss on the cheek. “There is one more thing. Give me your dress.”
“My dress, Princess?”
“Quiet! Not so loud—the others are just in the retiring room. We must be quick. Then take this robe and put it on.”
To her credit, young Agnes did not waste time asking questions. With Briony’s help she got the dress off, and as she stood shivering in her shift Briony draped the night-robe around her.
“Now help me,” Briony told her.
When she was laced into the dress, Briony took Agnes to the chest. “It goes without saying that you may have any of my dresses you choose,” she said. “There are several in the big chest. But I want you to have something else. Here. The fool who gave this to me did not get what he wanted for it, but he gave it to me nevertheless, so it is mine to give to you.” She took out the expensive bracelet Lord Nikomakos had sent her as a love gift and clasped it around the girl’s wrist.
Agnes’ eyes grew wide, then a tear welled up in the corner of each. “You are too kind to me, Princess!”
“No. You still have one more job to do and it is not an easy one. You must convince the king’s men when they come for me—it may be tonight if something has made them wonder, or it may not be until sometime tomorrow—that you did not know what I was doing.” She frowned. “No, that will not work—you are too clever a girl. You must convince them that I frightened you into keeping quiet.”
Now it was Agnes who frowned and shook her head. “I will not blacken your name, Princess Briony. Leave it to me—I will think of something.”
“May the gods bless you, Agnes! Now, when we get to the door, come halfway out and no farther—and keep your face turned away from the guards.”
Just as they opened the door, Briony said loudly, “Hurry, girl! You must go to her and come back quickly. I want to go to sleep!”
There was only one guard, and as Briony hoped, he only straightened up long enough to see the two familiar shapes—the woman in the robe bidding her servant go out one last time—before leaning back on the wall again.
“Princess running you near to death, is she, my lady?” he called as Briony trotted past with the bundled cloak clasped to her breast.
“Oh, yes,” she said—but in a murmur only she could hear. “It’s true, I am quite beside myself tonight.” A moment later she had turned into the adjoining corridor.
She retraced the route she had traveled with Eneas, stopping in the stables long enough to don the boy’s clothes she’d worn as a player. She thanked Zoria and the other gods that the cloak she had picked was a warm one: it might have been spring in Syan, but it was a cold night. She was also grateful that it was a market night and the palace’s gates were open late as people went in and out. She buried the dress Agnes had given her in the straw and made her way out of the stables and through the gate to the town.
Briony headed straight for the tavern where the players had been staying. The Whale Horse was in a narrow street in a dark but active part of Tessis near the river docks; its sign depicted a strange sea creature with tusks curling from its mouth. Drunken men wandered past, singing or quarreling, some of them with women on their arms as drunk and quarrelsome as themselves. Briony was glad she was dressed as a man and she prayed that no one tried to make her talk. This looked like the kind of place where it might not go well for her even if she were thought a boy instead of a girl.
Nevin Hewney was sleeping with his head on a table in the tavern’s main room. Finn Teodoros, in somewhat better condition beside him, still did not recognize her for a long moment, even after she whispered his name.
He leaned back as if to see her whole, then leaned forward again. “Young Tim . . . I mean Prin—”
Briony smacked her hand over his mouth so sharply that a less drunken man would have cried out in pain. “Don’t say it! Is the company all here? ”
“I sink tho . . . I mean, I think so. Big Dowan has gone to bed hours ago. I believe I saw Makewell chatting up a local merchant ...” He goggled at her again, as if not sure he wasn’t dreaming. “What are you doing here? And dressed . . . like that?”
“I’m not going to talk about it here. Round up Hewney and meet me in your room.”
“Feival?” Teodoros went pale. “Is this true?”
“True? Do you think I would lie? He betrayed me!”
“I’m sorry, Highness, I just wouldn’t have . . . that is . . . by the Trickster, who could have guessed?”
“Any of us, if we’d had any sense.” Nevin Hewney sat up, dripping. He had been dousing his head in a basin of water. “Always ha
d a taste for the better things, our Feival. I said he’d leave us someday for a rich man . . . or even a rich woman. Well, he found one. And he doesn’t even have to swive her.”
“Hewney!” said Teodoros, shocked. “Not in front of the princess.”
Briony rolled her eyes. “None of it is new to me, Finn, just because I went back to being a princess—only my clothes changed.” She laughed sourly. “And look! I’m back in my old clothes again.”
The fat playwright looked miserable. “What will you do now, Highness?”
“What will I do? No, it is what we will do—and what we’ll do is leave tonight. Feival has named you all as my spies—said it in front of the king of Syan himself. There may be soldiers on the way here already.”
Hewney grunted. “That little whoreson!”
Finn blinked. “The king’s men?”
“Yes, you great fool, and be grateful I thought of coming to you. This way, at least you have a chance to escape. We’ll make for Southmarch.”
“But how? We have no money, no supplies . . . How will we get out the gates?”
“That remains to be seen.” She took the last of the gold Eneas had loaned her from her pocket—a shiny dolphin—and tossed it to Teodoros, who for all his consternation caught it smoothly. “Take it and get on with things. I’ll wait here while you round up the others. Are they close?”
Finn looked around. “Most of them. Estir’s out somewhere. And tall Dowan went out, too. Bathed and shaved.” He goggled. “I think he might have a woman!”
“I don’t care, Finn, but we need them all back, and quickly.”
“Me, I’m going to get a jug of wine to take with us,” announced Nevin Hewney. “If I’m to die, may the gods forbid it’s sober.”
Finn Teodoros also stood. “May the gods watch over us all,” he said. “It seems the life of a princess is never dull, and almost always dangerous. For once I am glad my veins run thick with peasant blood.”
30
Light atthe Bottom of the Stairs
“The Soterian monk and scholar Kyros believed strongly that the Qar were not things of flesh and blood but instead the unshriven souls of mortal men who lived before the founding of the Trigonate Church. Phayallos disputes this, saying that the fairies, ‘while often monstrous, are clearly living creatures.’”
—from “A Treatise on the Fairy Peoples of Eion and Xand”
EVEN THE OPEN SKY felt dangerous, but people were gathering again in the little square in front of the Throne hall, setting up stalls, haggling over what someone had discovered in their root cellar or the morning’s meager catch of small fish from the unguarded East Lagoon. Like everyone else, Matt Tinwright kept looking fearfully over his shoulder, but although the massive black trunks of the Twilight People’s thorn bridge still bent above the castle’s outer walls, the immense, bristling shadows throwing much of Market Square into darkness, the fairy folk themselves had truly left the outer keep.
Not left for good, though, Tinwright feared: from atop the walls they could still be seen through the smoke and mist, moving around in their camp on the mainland as though the slaughter of the last few days had never happened.
Nobody trusted this sudden peace because the retreat itself made no sense. The creatures had entirely overrun the castle’s walls, a swarm of horrors like demons out of a temple fresco; despite the best efforts of Avin Brone, Durstin Crowel, and even Hendon Tolly himself, the fairies had utterly routed the humans from the outer keep. Much of Market Square and the great Trigonate temple had been burned—parts of the neighborhood just southwest of the gate wall were still smoldering. The streets of the inner keep were now clogged with human wreckage, those without homes huddling against the walls in tents made from scraps of cloth, untreated wounded lying everywhere, so that it looked as though some great flood had crashed through the Raven Gate and broken against the throne hall, scattering flotsam on all sides. Tinwright had seen sights already this morning that would haunt his sleep for years—children still black with burns, beyond help but still pitifully crying, whole families ill or starving, slumped in a fevered pile outside shuttered houses, warmth and help only a few uncrossable yards away.
But then yesterday, after all this destruction, after bringing such horror to so many, the Twilight People had simply stopped their siege of the inner keep as though hearing a silent call and had begun an orderly retreat. They took nothing, not prisoners, not gold—the ruined but otherwise untouched Trigonate temple was now surrounded by Hendon Tolly’s men to keep out looters—and disappeared back into the mist as though the entire siege had been nothing more than a murderously bad dream.
But whatever the reason, Matt Tinwright, like his fellow Southmarch citizens, had been given some breathing space—he could not afford to spend it wondering about the fairies and their incomprehensible motives. He had a family to provide for now, of sorts: Elan and his mother were staying with Puzzle’s niece in Templeyard, a relatively quiet neighborhood in the southwestern part of the keep, but the pantries were bare and, in a household of women, the task of going out into the city for food had of course fallen to Tinwright. He hadn’t wanted to be the one to do the marketing, but even the narrow streets of Templeyard were so full of refugees he feared to send any of the women out on their own. He was also terrified that his mother, full of self-righteous prattle as always, might say something in public that would give away who the girl she was caring for truly was.
So, as seemed to be his lot these days, he had been left with two bad alternatives, sending his mother out for food or going himself, and had chosen the one that seemed least dangerous.
It was strange, Tinwright thought as he made his way through the unsettled crowds, stepping over the helpless and trying to harden his heart against the pleading of injured men or mothers with hungry children. The soldiers who only a scant day earlier had been fighting on the walls against creatures out of legend were now forced to break up scuffles between hungry Southmarch folk. Just in front of him now two men were wrestling in the mud over a scrawny marrow grown in someone’s window box. For a moment he considered making it the subject of a poem—how different from the usual matters!—but Matt Tinwright was serving so many masters that he had no time even to think these days, let alone write. Still, it was an interesting idea—a poem about people fighting over a vegetable. It certainly said more about the times he lived in than a love poem written for a courtier on the subject of a young woman’s white throat.
He was on his way back from Market Square with a slightly moldy heel of bread rolled in his cloak beside a small onion and his most exciting find, a length of dried eel that had taken most of his shopping money. The eel stews his mother had made were one of the few happy memories of his childhood. Anamesiya Tinwright had only bought eels on the days the boats came back with too many and the prices were low, so the meal had been a treat that would bring both Matt and his father to the table early, hands and faces washed, mouths watering in anticipation.
I should see if I can find some Marashi pepper pods somewhere in this wreckage of a city . . . he was thinking when he abruptly found himself face to face with Okros, the royal physician, who had just stepped out of the doorway of a chicken butcher’s yard.
“Oh! Good day, my lord,” said Tinwright, startled, his heart suddenly drumming. Does he know I know him? Have we ever actually spoken, or have I only spied on him?
Okros himself looked, if anything, more startled than the poet. He had something under his cloak—something alive, it quickly became clear. Even as the smaller man tried to step past Tinwright, a bright, desperate eye and yellow beak popped out where Okros was trying to hold the garment closed at his neck. It was a rooster, and quite a handsome one from its brief appearance, with a red comb and shiny black feathers.
Okros barely glanced at Tinwright, as if it might hurt to look someone directly in the eye. “Yes, yes,” he said, “good day.” A moment later he was gone, hurrying back toward the castle as though possessing a c
hicken might be a crime against the throne.
Perhaps he is afraid of being robbed, Tinwright thought. Some people here would kill for a smaller meal than that. But the whole encounter seemed strange. Surely there were more birds to be found in the castle residence than down here in the ruins of the outer keep—and why should the physician seem so furtive?
As he made his way back up the hill toward the Inner Keep a memory floated just beyond Tinwright’s reach—something from a book he had read, one of his father’s . . .
The love of reading might have been the only gift the old man had given him, he sometimes thought, but it had been a good one: a nearly endless supply of books, mostly borrowed (or perhaps stolen, Matt Tinwright suddenly thought now) from the houses where Kearn Tinwright had been a tutor—Clemon, Phelsas, all the classics, as well as lighter fare like the poetry of Vanderin Uegenios and the plays of the Hierosoline and Syannese masters. Reading Vanderin had inspired young Matt with visions of a courtly life, a career of being admired by fine ladies and rewarded with gold by fine gentlemen. Strange that he should finally be living that life and yet be so cursedly miserable . . .
The thing that had been tickling his memory came to him suddenly—some lines from Meno Strivolis, the Syannese master poet of two centuries earlier:And took she then the black cockerel
Laid it on the stone, took up her sharp knife
Let out the salt wine that Kernios drinks . . .
That was all—just a morsel from Meno about Vais, the infamous witch-queen of Krace, a few lines which spoke of a black cockerel like the one the physician had been hiding. Nothing else to it—but it was odd that Okros should come so far just to buy poultry. Better and fatter birds could be found in the residence henyard, surely . . .
But perhaps not birds of that particular color, Tinwright thought suddenly. More of the poem had come to him:Always it is blood that calls the High Ones